How We Develop a Social Marketing Campaign: 3 part series

So, after the initial research phase, we hit the development phase. Here we share the insights in order, come up with the outline for our creative concepts and we figure out how we are going to approach the intervention.

During development, we cover:

Design ideas

Creative messages

Service delivery and pathways into services

Implementation costs

We would then begin to present our creative concepts, our understanding and what impact the message and activity will have on various audience types. This is also when we would start to discuss promotional strategy and implementation ideas with the client.

Welcoming ideas and inviting opinions

Our next step is to begin pre-testing. This could involve focus groups and workshops, depth interviews and sessions with appropriate informed subject professionals. Our aim during pre-testing is to make any participants feel as though they are part of the development process. We don’t want anyone to feel like a lab-rat, or as though they are being interrogated.

Once again though, being a third party means that people tend to be more honest with their opinions and we ensure that everyone feels comfortable and entitled to give their own ideas and suggestions. We value everyone’s viewpoints and we use them to evaluate, tweak and finalise our approach.

We also tend to select focus groups from pre-established groups, for example social groups/sport and fitness clubs/activity groups as, again, this helps people feel more comfortable and therefore more likely to be honest about their opinions and speak freely about their ideas. We’re also very careful not to come across as too clinical or sterile and given the nature of our work we often seek to introduce topic in a way which will illicit an emotional response.

Case Study: Insight Matters – How it feeds into what we do.

eskimosoup have a wealth of experience in developing creative briefs from client insight, with over 100 campaigns that we’ve developed and implemented under our belts.

One example to demonstrate our understanding of insight work is a project we have been doing on behalf of the Movember Foundation, looking at innovative ways of encouraging men to take action and seek assistance with physical and mental health concerns.

Guided by an expert the Australian-based men’s health charity, Beyond Blue, we have undertaken a significant review of research into the well-documented issue of resistance amongst men to visit their GP for early intervention and speak up around mental health and wellbeing issues. Whilst our outcomes and suggestions are still in development, they will embrace an ethos of men “taking action” on their health as an act of strength, and how they can reach out to “help out a mate” who is socially isolated or who is not attempting to rectify a clear health concern.

As part of this ongoing work is the creation of a bid to develop a social marketing initiative targeting men aged 25-44 with a behavioural change programme that utilises humour and peer group dynamics to instigate positive health behaviours. This has also required us to develop a proposed intervention, with creative designs, content and activities, which has been tested with 12 groups of men in a workshop and focus group setting, before refining the whole approach for evaluation by an international funding panel; fingers crossed they like it!